The Wrong Heaven

by Amy Bonnafons

  I lay awake all night, thinking about what I’d allowed to happen. In a moment of abandon, I’d compromised the children’s safety—but not in the way I had feared. How could I have expected Carl to be careful with them when he didn’t even know they existed? By keeping them secret, was I actually placing them in greater danger?

  I’d shrieked at him with such venom, as if he were a monster—a dragon, an ogre, a giant. But he wasn’t a monster: just a large, gentle man attempting to love his wife.

  I stayed awake all night, trying to gather courage. Was it possible to do a courageous thing fearfully? Perhaps one might propel oneself into the future even in a state of tension and panic, even with one’s fingers curled in a death grip around the past.

  I got up early and knocked on Carl’s door.

  “Come in,” he said, feebly.

  “I have something to show you,” I said, my heart pounding, my extremities cold.

  I held the shoe box out to him. Silently, he took it from me. He lifted the lid, peeked in, and then removed the whole lid and stared down at the contents.

  “Well,” he said. His voice sounded puzzled. “They’re beautiful.”

  Only then did I peer into the shoe box myself. And I screamed, a terrible scream, how I imagine Otto’s mother must have screamed when she watched him slip beneath the moving train on that terrible morning—because there were Otto and Gretel, just as I’d left them, but completely inert and unalive. They stared blankly up at the ceiling with their painted eyes, the expressions hardened in their empty balsa-wood faces.

  “What’s wrong?” said Carl.

  I took back the box. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry.” I had compromised too much, or perhaps too little. “I think I need to move out.”

  I moved my things into a rented room on the other side of town. A week went by. Like a delicate idea that loses its viability when spoken aloud too soon, the children failed to come alive again. Their pretty wooden bodies lay on their tiny beds, still and horizontal as corpses.

  Despite my grief, I finished Mrs. Perlman’s dollhouse. I wrapped the Otto and Gretel dolls, along with their parents and older brother, carefully in brown paper and twine. I had finished ahead of schedule. But I couldn’t bring myself to deliver them to Mrs. Perlman, not yet.

  One morning, I went to the park and found the spot where Carl played. I sat on a large rock, from which I could see him but he could not see me. I sat and listened.

  He was playing one of the songs of our early courtship:

  And he made a fiddle bow of her long yellow hair

  Oh, the wind and rain

  It was amazing how small and far away he looked, even from this short distance. I took my hand out of my pocket and lifted it up, bracketing Carl’s body with my thumb and pointer finger. I sat like this for a minute, holding him between my fingers. I held him and I held him and I held him.

  Back in my rented room, I unpacked my own dollhouse, the replica of the apartment I’d shared with Carl. I set up the Irene and Carl dolls in the dining room chairs where Otto and Gretel had sat on their laps. They stared at each other across the table. I stared at them. Then I reached for my instruments.

  I carved without thinking, as always happened when I did my best work. I’d begun working with no specific intention, but the little human took shape beneath my fingers anyway, insistently and specifically, as though I were simply obeying the wood’s will toward a particular form. I watched it become she, a little girl, perhaps five or six years old. Her features were distinctly her own, yet resembled both mine and Carl’s. She had Carl’s blue eyes and my brown hair, Carl’s full cheeks and my hard, inquisitive stare. There was a slight, almost imperceptible twist of impish merriment at the corner of her mouth that seemed to come from neither of us, that was entirely hers.

  When she was finished, I held her in the palm of my hand and gazed at her. She was, without question, the best and most lifelike doll I’d ever created—better even than Drexel, better than Otto and Gretel. Still, she was not alive. At least, not yet.

  The next morning I packed the new doll into a small nut-shaped box padded with cotton: a soft little elfin cradle. I walked to the park, hands in the pockets of my long skirt, fingers curled around my small round secret.

  Carl was in the same place as always. I sensed him first, and then I saw him: growing bigger and bigger, more and more detailed, as I approached. His blue shirt, his red hair, his dear sad face.

  I watched him look up, notice me, set his banjo down on the ground. I watched him stand and stiffen at my approach, wearing a look of melancholy expectation.

  When we finally stood face-to-face, I grew shy. “I’ve come to give you something,” I said.

  “Something for me?”

  “Yes.”

  “What?”

  “A child.” I removed the small cradle from my pocket and placed it in his outstretched hand. Slowly, carefully, his large fingers eased it open.

  We both watched, breathless, as the little girl stirred in her sleep. Then she stretched, yawned, opened her eyes.

  She sat up. “Finally,” she said, looking from one of us to the other. “I’ve been waiting forever.”

  “For what?” murmured Carl.

  “To be born,” she said matter-of-factly. Then she leapt, like a little goat, from the cradle onto Carl’s forearm. She gripped the cuff of his sleeve and hung from it, as from monkey bars, kicking her legs to make herself swing back and forth. “Whee!” she giggled. “This is fun!”

  Instinctively I put my hand beneath her, so as to catch her if she fell. Carl just stared at her in wonder—then back at me, then back again at the child. This was what he’d wanted: something that was not just adjacent to me but of me, of us.

  The little girl released her grip on Carl’s cuff and dropped, like a small stone, into my hand. She looked up at us. “Shall we go home?” she asked.

  Carl looked at me with questioning eyes. I nodded. “Yes,” I said. “We can all go home.”

  Carl smiled. “Perhaps first,” he said, “we should have a song.” He sat down on the grass and picked up his banjo.

  I sat down across from him, the little girl in my palm. She lay down on her belly, her chin propped in her hands, tiny elbows digging gently into my flesh.

  She waited; I waited. The world felt very quiet, very still—an alive kind of quiet, the humming quiet of trees and swarming insects and sleeping penguins, of breath preceding speech. Then Carl touched the strings and began to play.

  Alternate

  Before Cat and I even knew each other, we were a team, knocking on strangers’ doors to bring Barack Obama’s tidings of hope. Everyone in Brooklyn was already voting for him anyway, so they just cheered us on and thanked us for our service. It felt like we were showing up at people’s doors just to be congratulated. There was a precoital vibe, a tingling anticipation of victory. On Election Night, we stayed out way past midnight dancing in the streets of Park Slope, and when we fell into each other’s arms on Cat’s futon at four in the morning, it felt like the consummation of something huge: not just between us, but between us and America. It pains me to think of it now: the year 2008, the vastness of its innocence.

  Neither of us had dated women before, so everything was new: this body so similar yet so other; this thrill of recognition as we passed gay couples on the street, like we were part of a secret club; and then the actual secret club. Lesbian bars, queer potlucks, dyke knitting circles. Knitting circles!

  But eventually we learned a sadder kind of lesson: no matter how creative their sexual practices or identity politics, all couples fail in the same way. Barack Obama had promised us the future. Instead we got what we’d always had: the present. It was just as provisional and unsatisfying as ever, as clogged as ever with obligation and regret. Despite our best efforts to become different people, we had remained ourselves.

  Cat and I moved in together, to an attic apartment in Gowanus—which, we were told, was now a Hot Ne
ighborhood despite the fact that its single landmark was a sludgy, polluted canal best known as a site for depositing toxic waste and dead bodies.

  “It’s getting a Whole Foods soon,” chirped the real estate agent. I nodded; Cat frowned. I loved Whole Foods: wandering the spacious well-lit aisles, marveling at how anything at all—even bread, even a can of beans—could become a luxury item, a thing of beauty and promise. I always emerged from the store with something ridiculous: a ten-dollar jar of pink Himalayan salt, a tureen of maple butter, a single persimmon. Cat, on the other hand, abhorred vanity and waste and anything corporate. She bought beans by the sack at the Park Slope food co-op, kept them in mason jars; every Sunday she cooked a huge vat of chili and ate it all week long. She didn’t believe New York had to be expensive—not if you constantly trimmed your desires, kept them humble and well groomed and midwestern.

  But the Whole Foods did not yet exist, it was just an idea—so we avoided fighting about it. It was a fight we probably should have had. Instead, we took the apartment.

  Over the next year, this unfought fight grew swollen within us, like an egg full of baby spiders, eventually exploding into thousands of little scurrying fights, so many that we couldn’t possibly keep track of them all. Before, the differences between us had been abstract, immaterial, intriguing; now they were embodied in the pile of unwashed laundry at the foot of the bed, the grout on the tub, the passive-aggressive sticky notes that greeted me on the mirror every morning. We never managed to settle on a decorating scheme for the bedroom. One of its walls was dominated by a large window—which had been a major selling point, though it was constantly covered in soot from the elevated F train that audibly shook the building every ten minutes or so. I wanted to paint the other walls in swirly Van Gogh pastels and stick glow-in-the-dark stars to the ceiling, while Cat wanted to leave them crisp white, like museum walls, and hang a professionally framed Rothko print. At an impasse, we did nothing; our “HOPE” poster hung over the kitchen table, Obama’s face smiling in its measured yet beatific way upon our bowls of breakfast cereal, but the bedroom walls remained blank: sites of possibility that quickly became sites of curdled potential, like a blank page stared at too long.

  We ceased speaking of the bedroom; we spoke of other failures. Cat was paying all of our utility bills, and my savings were running out. I grew panicked, she grew resentful, and we both privately wondered if we’d made a fundamental mistake, a mistake about the nature of hope.

  Finally, one day, after we’d been living together for more than a year, I came home to find Cat sitting on our bed, staring at the blank white wall.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Looking at this wall,” she said.

  “I mean what are you doing internally.”

  “Trying to decide on a strategy.”

  “For?”

  “What to do.”

  “About the wall? I thought we’d decided to leave it that way.”

  “We didn’t decide anything. We just stopped trying.”

  I sensed that we were no longer talking about the wall.

  “I just want to wake up one morning,” she said, finally, “and look at something that’s not nothing.”

  I didn’t respond. I never would have survived as a caveman or even a cavewoman. I have no fight-or-flight-instinct, only a freeze-and-blend-into-the-background instinct. In this case, though, there was nothing to blend into. There was just us.

  I stood there and silently watched as she got up, a look of resolve on her small freckled face, and began throwing clothes into a bag. I watched as she zipped the bag up, threw it over her shoulder, and gave me a long, questioning look. I continued watching, saying nothing, as she walked out the door and slammed it behind her. I watched the room attempt to settle itself, the objects stunned and mute in the wake of her sudden absence.

  I could stand there for a long time, probably. My legs wouldn’t even start to ache for another hour or two. Humans could go days without water, weeks without food. I could just refuse the present until it slid backwards into the past for lack of momentum, and everything was bright again.

  I’d been standing there for over an hour when my phone rang. I lunged for it unthinkingly, assuming it was Cat, only to see a puzzling 301 number displayed across the screen. I took the call.

  “Is this Andrea Green?” asked a chipper male voice. It sounded nonspecifically familiar, like it might once have announced a special offer for valued customers like me, or asked me to return my tray table to the upright position.

  “Yes, it’s Andrea.”

  “Hi, this is Jeremy! I’m calling from Barack Obama’s office?”

  “What?”

  “Hi, this is Jeremy! I’m calling from Barack Obama’s office?”

  “Wait, Jeremy Bird? The guy I get all the emails from?”

  “No. Everyone thinks that at first! My name is Jeremy Spoon. Like the utensil? Anyway, Andrea, I’m calling with some good news! You’re an alternate!”

  “For what?”

  “The Dinner With Barack contest!”

  This rang a bell, faintly: Andrea, I am writing to invite you to dinner. Donate $15 or more today and you will be entered in the running for an evening with me! I had responded, mostly because of the pathos of it—Barack Obama, so desperate he’d ask me out. Without thinking, I’d clicked on the PayPal button and donated twenty bucks, then forgotten about it.

  “I’m an alternate?” I asked Jeremy Spoon. “What does that mean?”

  “It means that we drew four names, and yours was the fifth. We always draw an extra, just in case! Family illnesses, freak accidents, lightning. Not to be a downer! But things happen! So hold the date on your calendar. If you don’t get called, you’ll get a compensation prize: a phone call from the president! Oh, and a gift certificate to Applebee’s.”

  “Cool. I like Applebee’s.”

  “One more thing. We post interviews with the winners on our website. And in case you end up coming, we need the same footage for you that we’ll have for everyone else. So we want to come film you at your home next week—ask you about your life and your relationship to the campaign. It should be fun!”

  “Yes, that does sound like fun,” I said, though actually it sounded like an anxiety-inducing nightmare.

  We set up a date for the interview. Which meant: in one week, a camera would come to our apartment, with America attached to the other end of it. America would stare our apartment in the face, would behold and appraise us, and our apartment would stare back.

  I hung up the phone, terrified. But as I paced around the room, thinking about the phone call—its symbolic import, its strange and fortuitous timing—it came to seem like an omen, a near-magical second chance. Not only could I win Cat back: I had to.

  Our relationship wasn’t perfect, but it was better than any other I’d had. In the years before we met, the closest I’d come to romance was a series of drunken hand jobs I gave to one of my co-workers at Mustache Mark’s, an overpriced vintage store in Williamsburg. Actually, it was Mustache Mark himself. He had a two-year-old son with a lady who brewed kombucha in her living room; despite or because of the kid, they could never decide whether to be together or not. He’d tell me about it while we closed up the store, passing a flask back and forth, and somehow his mouth would always end up on mine, his penis in my hand. He seemed to feel it wasn’t a betrayal of the kombucha lady if my pants never came off. At least they were nice pants; I got a good employee discount. Then I met Cat and, for the first time in years, I thought: what if I didn’t just take what fell into my hands? What if I actually reached for more?

  Cat convinced me to quit my job there, to finish Losers on the Roof—the short film I’d been working on since college—and apply to film school. At first it went great. I had wind in my sails; I had Cat’s hot breath on my neck each morning. But lately I kept looking at the film through an NYU admissions officer’s eyes, deciding it was adolescent and bloated, and deleting half o
f it, only to put the missing parts back the next time. I was no longer folding and reshelving clothes, but again my life consisted just of taking things out and putting them back in.

  It seemed suddenly clear to me, standing there in our bare-walled bedroom as Jeremy Spoon’s words echoed through my ears, that Cat had been correct about my lapse into stagnant passivity. I’d relied on her to generate enough momentum for the both of us. But now I’d been given a second chance!

  This meant one thing and one thing only: I had a one-week deadline to get the apartment ready, to win Cat back. It wouldn’t be enough, at this point, to just hang her Rothko print: that would signal mere capitulation. I had to proactively demonstrate my understanding of her—her secret desires, her vulnerabilities, her hidden reserves of dreaminess—better than she understood herself. I had one week to get something amazing onto that blank wall.

  I swallowed my pride and went to Ikea. I bought a track-lighting fixture and a large floor plant that, I was promised, would bloom in a matter of days. None of the pictures, though, seemed worthy of the task I needed them to perform. They all seemed sterile and self-effacing in a particularly Scandinavian way. I needed something more assertive: something American, or at least French.

  I spent the rest of the day on Craigslist, looking for seductive home decorations. None were seductive in the way I needed. There were leopard-print mirrors, watercolor paintings of clowns, life-sized cardboard cutouts of Miley Cyrus. And plenty of attractive, unobjectionable things too, but I could not abide the thought of choosing something merely unobjectionable—and used, nicked and stained with other people’s failures.

  And then, just like that, I found it.